What range of earnings can I expect from 1 million page views a month

[xpro]

I'm working on a very large website that will take months to finish. The traffic will be almost all from USA, I know that earnings can differ based on niche and other things. But what is the range I can generate from Adsense from 1 Million page views a month if the traffic is from USA?

[Dimitri]

IF you succeed to have 1 million page views per month, and IF you succeed to have 1 million page views per month from US "human" visitors, then ... it depends of the niche and other things.

[xpro]

lol, ok can you tell me if it would be in the range of $100 to $1000 a month? or would it be in the range of $7000 to $10000 a month? I can't tell you the niche, but the niche has a higher pay than average.

[tangor]

ER.... $0 to $x?

My crystal ball is not working. Need to get it into the shop. :)

With the changes in the way g and ads are working in recent months it is exceedingly difficult to make prognostications on future income.

Meanwhile:

@xpro .... welcome to Webmasterworld!

[xpro]

ok, it's unfortunate, but I guess the only to know is to finish the project, I will take months of work. Hopefully it will pay off a little bit at least.

[tangor]

The web remains a work-in-progress at all times. It is not fixed, it is fluid, it is like the weather ... if you don't like it, wait fifteen (minutes, weeks, months) and it will change. :)

Adsense is merely a part of what can be done for income. Do not neglect the other opportunities out there.

There is no blueprint for income ... it is not guaranteed, in fact, you do not even have a contract for performance by the party of the second (or third) part!

[tangor]

BTW ... 1M pages views on how many pages? How many bots?

Example, I have a 700 page site (info) that gets 300,000 hits per month ... but after analysis only 25,000 visitors (human, some repeats, when reduced to UNIQUE per months comes to 2,200!) and of those, most pages are in the single and low double digits. Not every page is a winner, not every hit is a human, and dang few of any of those ever convert.

The only thing a 1M site does is scale the errors/omissions to stellar levels.

The web is 90% automated, of the 10% remaining approximately 10% of that will be converted to income, and if that income is adsense have to change that to .001% ...

[xpro]

The way I came up with 1 million a month, is by looking at a few competitor's Similarweb, which states they get somewhere around 2 Million to 50 Million depending on the site. Not sure how accurate Similarweb is in determining if it's real human traffic or bots.

[Dimitri]

The way I came up with 1 million a month, is by looking at a few competitor

Hum...

[tangor]

What do your LOGS say? That's the "truth" ... and even in that truth you have to cull out the bots and bs!

[freitasm]

One million pageviews a month? As mentioned, it you really depend on your niche, country, site speed, content, bot presence, etc.

I can say it is possible to see anything between high four digits and low five digits per month if you are in a good position. But it is also completely possible to make close to nothing.

Basically, every case is different.

[Pixby8]

One of my sites makes 2K per month off only 3,000+ page views per day, or roughly 100,000 page views per month. I would love to have a million a month. That would be 20K per month for me on that site alone. However, that assumes that the ad inventory would be the same when extrapolated out to a million page views, and that's probably not the case. The reason being that Google's algo will cap specific ads from running too much on your site over certain time periods, and as the day goes on, some advertisers reach their spending max and stop serving, reducing ad inventory, meaning less competition. In other words, as your views go up throughout the day, your CPC will naturally go down. So, the only real way to know what you can make for sure in your niche and with your site design is to actually do it. You may have a great concept, but with the wrong site design that encourages accidental clicks, you could get stuck on a double-click penalty and not even realize why your earnings seem low for the amount of page views you get. My advice? As you build this site, make sure it is highly flexible in terms of design so that you can always, always, always be split or multi-testing different options.

[tangor]

@Pixby8 ... good insight on expectations.

Meanwhile, I want to know if the logs are actually 1M (I will include images and css, and .ico in that) and what those end numbers are. @xpro seems to be working on a PROJECTED hit count, and that can never be answered without hard numbers.

[tangor]

Or more bluntly stated:

Speculation is just that. (sigh)

[lucy24]

I'm working on a very large website that will take months to finish. The traffic will be

Never mind what it will be. What is the traffic now? On what basis are you predicting, say, 100x as much (assuming currently 10,000 humans/month) when it’s all done?

That’s not even getting into the technicalia of 100x as much business != 100x as much profit.

Right now it sounds an awful lot like “Quick! I need investment advice because I just bought a lottery ticket.”

[xpro]

It's not just speculation, through out the years I have created large websites that have gotten similar traffic to what I was expecting. But they were not AdSense friendly, I monetized them by affiliate offers. This is the first time I'm making something large that would be AdSense friendly and I sometimes wonder if it's worth the time to create something so big if I end up getting nothing out of it.

[tangor]

@xpro ... none intend to be unkind!

Unicorns, blue sky, and "what if" can't be done without hard numbers.

You logs will give you answer long before simulations can.

Code your site, get it on line, and tweak it where it needs be in the future!

[riccarbi]

From $100 to $10,000 depending on your niche and what Google will do with AdSense in the near future.

Plus, consider that pageview count is a notoriously overrated metric. In my experience, in order to evaluate your AdSense performances, to correlate earnings with (number of sessions x session duration) makes much more sense. It's how many minutes in total users spend on your website which has an influence on advertising earnings, IMHO; since the more time people spend reading your content the more likely someone among them will click on an Ad unit, sooner or later.

[Dimitri]

AdSense friendly

Hum...

[engine]

Very difficult to estimate, but assume low and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Of course, your site has to be found in the first instance, and could languish down the charts.

To put the numbers into context, 1 million page views per month (1m /30days = 33k per day), and take anything from 1 third to half being bots, could be 10,000 to 20,000 visitors per day (all very approximate). I'd like to think you can get as much as 10% to click, but CTR likely to be lower, therefore 1,000 to 2,000 clicks. Now, here's the other part you cannot get a guide on, and it's the CPM on each click. CPC is going to be very difficult to pin down because of too many variables (how much the advertiser is bidding, how often the higher value ads display, where they display, etc.) . .

I've seen low and high CPCs on the same page, but it rarely lasts high, with low CPC being my expectation.

I always under-estimate, and then, if it comes in better i'm rarely disappointed.

Build the site for visitors and not for AdSense.

[NickMNS]

The rough estimate rule of thumb is in terms of page RPM, $2. That is $2 per 1000 pages views, which works out to $2000. As everyone has mentioned above, there are many variables at play, so you could see anywhere from $0 to $10,000, even more if you are really lucky.

Not sure how accurate Similarweb is in determining if it's real human traffic or bots.

Similarweb is not accurate at all, at best it will provide rough order of magnitude. It claims to report real human traffic but given the lack of accuracy that is kind of moot.

Just because one or several existing sites are able to draw large traffic does not mean that you can just show up and suddenly get 1M PV a month. Those are not small numbers and the existing sites probably have a solid link profile and authority in the niche. It is unlikely that a new site will suddenly be able to steal all a significant portion of their traffic.

But, let's assume that your are successful, at 1M PV a month you will have a lot more options than just AdSense. You could implement header-bidding and it would certainly be more lucrative than simple AdSense.

I think your underlying questions is, is worth investing the time and effort to complete the site? The unfortunate answer, as evidenced by the consensus here, is no. Building a website in this day in age for AdSense is a horrible and stupid idea. The probability of failure is very high and success if it ever come is typically muted. So bad idea, but that hasn't stopped many of his here from trying.

[Nightmute]

$0 - $50,000

Highly dependent on vertical and % US traffic.

Adsense blows AdX / header bidding out of the water in certain verticals.

[lucy24]

One reason it's impossible to answer is that 1,000,000 is just a number without context. Do 30,000 people visit your site devotedly every single day? Do 6,000 people visit daily, reading an average of 5 pages? Or do 1,000,000 different people visit just once in the course of a typical month? Even if the ad is for something that I've been actively researching, I'm not going to click the identical ad five times in a row, let alone 150 times in the course of a month.

[NickMNS]

@Lucy24 that is true. At the same time, if the advertiser's goal is to reinforce brand awareness within a specific niche, having a repeat, dedicated and engaged audience can be very lucrative for the puplisher. But that said, this still supports your overall point ->

...it's impossible to answer .... 1,000,000 is just a number without context.

[lucy24]

if the advertiser's goal is to reinforce brand awareness within a specific niche, having a repeat, dedicated and engaged audience can be very lucrative

Oh, definitely, if you’re using advertising as a means to an end. (If I see one more ad for that book with the female pirate with a parrot on her shoulder, I will buy it...) But this thread seems to be about advertising as an end in itself.

[tangor]

But this thread seems to be about advertising as an end in itself.

Maybe, but I see it more as the odds of drawing to an inside straight. :)

OP was asking "what if" ... I want to know that the LOGS actually say.

If those "million page views" are all HUMANS, something might be said, but these traffic estimator sites don't seem able to make that determination. Bots rule the net these days. Find real humans that will click on ads is pretty difficult.

That said, the long game is AS MUCH TRAFFIC AS YOU CAN GET and somewhere in the mix you get a click or three. :)

[leebow]

Damn - it’s hard work getting straight answers on this site sometimes isn’t it! Yes it will depend on niche, etc etc etc.

Based on my niche - that would get you $3,000 a month

[tangor]

@leebow ...

Agreed! Then again, some questions don't have black and white answers. (sigh)